Can One Talk About the Experience of Prayer?

In what way is prayer like sex--too intimate a mystery to describe?  Yeah, well, lots of people talk about sex.  Sex is paraded around in movies, on TV, and in music.  And to a large degree it's cheapened.  But there are forms of public art that reveal the beauty and wonder of sex and can invite us deeper into its mystery.  We'd be better off without some forms of public talk of sex, but worse off without others. Prayer too is in many ways too intimate for words.  And yet, we are compelled to talk about it.  But how can we talk about it without cheapening it?  Can we explore it artfully, reverently, so that our talk can invite us deeper?  Is it worth trying?

I'll give it a try, then you tell me if such talk is cheap and, like sex, better left behind closed doors.

I crave God.  I desire an experience of God that can keep me sane in the midst of an active life, but can open the door toward real union with God even in the midst of the busiest moments of my active life.  I want to disappear into God, to be consumed by the sacred fire.  Recently, I experienced the following during a dawn period of contemplative prayer, and wrote of it later in my journal:

"In stillness early.  Light breaks in.  I shudder.  Tremble.  Catch my breath.  FIRE!  Theosis!  I see it.  Touch it.  Taste it.  LOVE!  I shake.  And must voluntarily come back down 'the mountain'.  The heights are too intense for me."

About "theosis" see this link.

Awareness Prayer :: Prayer of Repose :: Prayer of the Heart

From my journal | Tuesday, May 29, 2007 | Iona, Scotland Begin by greeting the Beloved.  Follow your easy breath, in and out.  Survey your whole body, beginning with the toes and ending with the nose.  Release all tension.  Sink into the Presence of God.  Gently breathe, giving your thoughts the freedom to come and go. Like snowflakes, you may notice them but you can’t hold them.  Simply let them fall.

If the Devil brings ugly things, lusts, lists, or pride into your mind, you can find freedom by telling him that you know what he’s up to.  Smile at him.  Laugh at him in the confidence that greater is He who is in you than all the hosts of the Devil.  The Devil cannot abide when you jeer him.

Return to the Beloved.  Open your heart to love.  Become drunk with love.  The demons are terrified when they encounter a soul aflame with love.  Love will tame the wild beasts—your mind, your commands, your will cannot.

Wait, wait, wait until you reach the silence which is the voice of the Beloved, then on the inhale speak inwardly, “Jesus,” and on the exhale, “Mercy.”  Repeat, following your uncontrolled breath as you rest in God.  When the restfulness begins to come to a natural conclusion—or you sense the need to do so—simply bring your soul to an awareness of its body again.  Thank the Beloved Trinity and re-enter the day.

Practice a Receptive Posture. Simply Consent to God

Those of us serious about God often feel like we’re floundering about in an ocean without a boat or life vest.  We may feel that without help we’ll drown in the roles and responsibilities, our to-do lists and daily dramas.  A drowning person fights to stay afloat, and we who seek the wholeness of a life with God through prayer often struggle to stay afloat. There are two problems that the spiritually serious face.  The first is not to work hard enough.  Prayer is work—not just the practice of prayer which our active lives, the many distractions that come to us moment after moment, do not support, but also the work of pressing past our illusions about ourselves, the masks we wear, the falsehoods that we parade about.  To get past ourselves and into God is work.

That said, the second problem we face is trying too hard.  Drowning in the sea of distractions we can panic.  Floundering about we will waste precious energy and go really nowhere.

Fr. Thomas Keating and the Centering Prayer school of contemplative spirituality help us here.  Keating’s practice is receptive.  It is a non-combative form of payer. And while Keating and his school do teach a method, that method is established on attitude.  The method supports the attitude.  That’s important.  A method approach to the life of prayer can get in the way of intimacy with God.  Most of us have an annoying habit of attaching ourselves more to a method than to the God we seek.

Here’s the center of Centering Prayer’s method.

Go into silence twice a day, aiming for 20 minutes each sitting.  “Seek the face of God” above all else (Psalm 27.8), and simply open yourself and consent to whatever God wishes to do within you.  Put unwavering trust in this consent.  It is enough.  Better than anything else.  And when the barrage of thoughts come at you:

• Resist no thought
• Retain no thought
• React emotionally to no thought
• And return, ever so gently, to the sacred word you’re using as prayer, calling your attention back to God when you get distracted.

By consenting to God in this way, you are receptive to grace, and you’ll stop floundering about in the sea of your otherwise distracting life.

The Problem with the Churches

An active and robust spirituality is what many people I meet long for.  They’re hurried and harried, fragmented and frustrated, and few have anyone to show them the way.  Unfortunately, many are turned off and turned away from Christian churches.  Churches too often meet those who seek God as too dogmatic and moralistic, oftentimes too concerned with church life to be much help to those seeking God.  Many of those who remain in the churches long for more, but figure this is all there is—read the Bible, give money, go to church activities, sit and listen to the preacher.  This is not what Christianity ultimately is.  And no one needs to settle for a second-hand spirituality.

To those who’ve dismissed Christianity as irrelevant to their heart’s desire, and those whose Christian experience is dull and obligatory, I extend this invitation:  join me in seeking a deep and continual experience of intimacy with God, awaken with me to the sacred in every day life, and to walk continually in it . . . revel in your sacred identity.

The interior life is the Way.

Deep within you’ll find God, and you’ll find the person you really are beneath the masks and charades, the wounds and busyness people like you and I use to prop up our aching selves.

This is what you’ll read about in these pages, and this is what I hope you’ll experience as you put into practice the invitation offered here.

God, Heart in Our Hearts

St. Paul (in the first century) wrote, “I pray that you may have the power to comprehend how high and wide, long and deep is the love of Christ, and that you may know this love that transcends all understanding so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”  St. Bernard of Clairvaux (twelfth century) said, God is “the stone in the stone, the tree in the tree.”

And so, God is the heart in our hearts, nearer then than our next breath!  And God is all around us if we have eyes to see and ears to hear.

My aim is to invite active people around the world to experience God in the midst of their daily lives —whether they are changing diapers, arguing a case before a jury, painting a wall, or walking in the woods.  My aim is to inspire those whose desire for God has been awakened for one reason or another to experience what saints and mystics have known of God throughout the ages—intimacy with the Great Holy Lover.  And by doing so, I want to inspire them to find their own way to live focused, happy, and compassionate lives in our turbulent world through contemplative practices.